Beating
by Cybele3
Summary: Gay-bashing at McKinley leaves Kurt in a coma. My first Glee fic; updates to follow.
1. Chapter 1

Kurt was hooked up to a million monitors, and they were beeping out of key.

"There's no real way of knowing, but we believe he can hear you," the nurse had told Kurt's dad sympathetically. "Talk to him. Hold his hand. It will comfort him to know you're here."

Burt nodded, then pulled a chair close to Kurt's bed and sat. The metal legs of the chair let out a long _skreeeeeeek_ as it moved across the floor, and Burt flinched, then grabbed Kurt's hand and began stroking it compulsively. "It's all right. It's all right," he repeated, his voice sweet and soft to keep it from breaking. "Shhh. It's okay." Burt's face was gray and his eyes hung loosely in bunched pockets of skin.

After awhile the nurse brought in a more comfortable chair. Burt took it, sat back down, took back his son's hand, and eventually fell asleep.

The Glee kids weren't allowed in, which left half of them torn up and the other half relieved that they wouldn't have to find any excuses. They made him a recording of the group's songs instead. It didn't go very well. Brittany wept extravagantly and had to leave the room repeatedly, although she'd never had much to do with Kurt when he was conscious. Rachel couldn't get through Defying Gravity without crying either, insisting over and over that it wasn't right for her to sing the solo and were there any recordings of Kurt singing it and were they sure he hadn't made any of himself singing it at home and could they maybe get Mr. Hummel to search his room for one? Quinn and Santana jumped in to let her know that searching Kurt's room was a huge invasion of privacy, Mercedes tried to break up the fight but wound up making everything louder and angrier, Tina found she'd developed a for-real stutter and Artie wheeled himself out of the room to figure stuff out on his own. Finn and Will were the walking dead.

Puck was gone.

As soon as he heard about Kurt, Puck went to Will and told him he was dropping Glee. Will had been so lost in his grief all day, and struggling so hard to think of everything that Glee could possibly do – another bake sale? car wash? benefit performance? – that it had never occurred to him that Glee itself might not stand united. At first he didn't understand what Puck was telling him.

"Leaving," he said. As though it might mean leaving school. Leaving the state. Something. Something not-this.

"Dropping Glee." And Puck held Will's gaze. How dare he hold Will's gaze? "I'm not up for this."

"Up for _what?_"

"Up for getting my head kicked in. Sorry, Schu. I'm not doing it."

Will's head was whirling. "None of us are getting –" Oh Jesus. "Staying with Glee will not get your head kicked in, Puck."

Puck stood up, shot him a level glance. "I'm one of two football players in Glee, Mr. Schuster. If Finn's got half a brain he'll quit too. This ain't over, and it ain't a good time for a football player to be singing in benefit concerts and holding bake sales for the fag who just got –"

Will was up so fast his chair fell over behind him. "How dare you use that word, Puck, how –" He was choking and talking anyway. " -- how can – you don't –"

Puck took the tiniest of steps back, and if you'd been listening closely you could have heard his breath quicken, but Will couldn't hear anything but the blood rushing through his ears. He barely heard Puck's next words, and wished he hadn't heard at all:

"It's fag-bashing, Mr. Schuster. Nothing else to call it. And it's not happening to me."

Will thought he'd remember the set of Puck's shoulders as he walked out of the room until his dying day.

So Will had the job of telling the group, at the emergency session they'd convened, that Puck was gone. Responses were in character, but Will found the only kid he could see was Finn, sitting with his face in his hands. Finn hadn't dropped yet, and Will wondered if he would. He wondered if Puck was right, if now wasn't a safe time for a football player to be on Glee.

And he wondered who Kurt had been kneeling in front of in the locker room that day -- the day before he got his head kicked in.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Work-in-progress. Responses, positive or negative, are welcome; I'm using this story to try to work on one or two particular aspects of my writing, and I'm curious as to whether it's working or not.

_Beating_, Ch. 2

Brandon Jamison was the kid who'd set off the firestorm, but he was sullen now and neither the police nor his buddies were getting much out of him. At first he'd told the police that Kurt was the one who'd punched him out in the locker room, but he dropped that story in record time after a cop inquired how a kid like Kurt could have taken out a linebacker like Brandon. So he reverted to the story he wound up sticking with, which happened to be the true story anyway: He'd walked into the locker room and seen "that queer" kneeling in the locker room, sucking someone off. There was a locker in the way and Brandon couldn't see who the other guy was. Before he could get his bearings – "I was just trying not to puke, man" – Kurt had looked up, his skin had blanched, and the other guy had dodged around the locker and punched Brandon in the side of the head hard enough to make him black out for a minute. When he came to they were gone. Brandon never saw the other guy. The police ran a polygraph and decided to believe him.

When they asked him why he'd tried to pin it on Kurt, he shrugged and got more sullen. From the bits of mumbles they picked up, they pieced together that he'd figured if Kurt hit him first, the beating Kurt took might be considered justifiable and no one would be prosecuted. Since half the football team was under suspicion, it didn't take long to figure that Brandon was looking to protect someone.

"So you beat him up in the locker room? Right there?"

Brandon shook his head vigorously. "_No_, man. I told you, I had nothing to do with the beating. Shit, that was the next day."

"You sure about that?"

Brandon stared at the table, face blank. "That's what you told me."

The guy cop, the one with the paunch, sighed. "Yeah. Tuesday, right?"

"Tuesday what? Tuesday he got beat up. Monday I saw them in the locker room."

The cop exchanged a look with his partner. There was no physical evidence in the locker room, and life would have been a lot simpler if Brandon and some of his buddies had jumped Kurt for no reason after school one day, but things weren't shaking down that way. Paunch-Cop tried one more time, just for the hell of it: "See, the problem is, Brandon, you trying to blame him for that punch you took to the head don't mean a thing unless you're calling this self-defense. Which –"

"I _didn't hit the kid_." Brandon shoved his chair back, kicked the table leg. "Not then, not the next day, not ever. Can I go now?"

They didn't let him go for another two hours, but it was a waste anyway. They knew everything he could tell them: locker room on Monday, beating on Tuesday, a bunch of football players were involved, Brandon spread the rumors that kicked everything off, and -- weirdly enough – according to the lie detector, he hadn't been part of the lynch mob himself. "Go get some new friends," were the cop's parting words to him.

So no luck with Brandon, and no luck with anyone else either. Kurt couldn't tell anybody anything. None of the people who cared about him – his dad and the Glee kids, basically – knew anything. The guys on the football team all had alibis, and half of them were giving alibis for one another, which proved nothing but had to be run down anyway. Parents were giving their kids alibis you could sieve marbles through, just to keep them out of it. Everyone was oblivious or lying or both.

There was one guy who knew everything, of course. He knew what had happened in the locker room and it was a fair bet that he knew what had happened the next day. But no one knew who he was, and he wasn't telling.

Scared.

Everyone was scared. The football players were scared. You heard it in the whispers on the sidelines, in the slurred arguments in middle of the woods on Saturday night with empty 40s scattered on the ground:

--We're playing _football_ with this queer. Every time someone tackles me it creeps me out.

--Yeah. They should give us, like, ass shields.

--But we don't know it was a football guy, really.

--Brandon saw the team uniform crumpled in the corner, douche.

--So? There's team uniforms on the floor in there all the time.

--Better than figuring it's someone on the team.

And the conversation always turned to Finn and Puck, Puck and Finn:

--It's got to be one of them.

--I dunno, man. Finn's Quinn's babydaddy and Puck's got more chicks than Perdue.

--So what? You never heard of bisexuals?

--Gross. I'm trying to drink a beer here, dude.

--All I'm saying's it don't have to be a Glee guy. Could be some guy on the dl.

--Brandon didn't say the guy was black.

--You don't have to be _black_ to be on the downlow, dumbass.

--Yeah? You know that much about it, huh?

--Shit, forget it. Figure it's one of the Gleeks. It sure wasn't me.

The refrain at the start and end of every conversation: _It wasn't me._

Finn never hung with the guys anymore. He'd've quit the football team if Quinn hadn't talked him out of it. "Quit and they'll be sure it was you." She placed his hand on her stomach. "I need you here with us, safe." And Finn nodded, but his eyes were as vacant as they'd been since that ten-year-old on a bike found Kurt curled on the sidewalk. On the team or off, Finn would have fared worse if it hadn't been for Puck: Puck made it clear he was ready to kick anyone's ass who messed with him or with Finn, and everyone knew he could make good on the threat. A few days after Kurt was hospitalized, some idiot tried to shave off Puck's mohawk. Puck landed one kick that cracked two of the kid's ribs, then told him what else would happen to him if he told anyone. The kid taped his own ribs up with instructions he found on the Internet and breathed shallow for a few weeks.

No one was going to mess with Puck, anyway. Not until they were sure he'd been the other guy in the locker room; maybe not even then. Puck was everyone's dealer, and there were a lot of drugs going around McKinley High lately. No one wanted a clear head these days.

Glee wasn't doing well. They were down two male voices and no one could pull themselves together long enough to sing anyway. The group spent a lot of time talking – about what had happened to Kurt, about what was happening at the school, about hate crimes in high school and what it all meant – but they were all hanging suspended, really. Waiting for Kurt to wake up and bring the life back to Glee. Trying not to think about what might be if he never woke up at all.

The only singing they did was the tapes for Kurt, something to keep playing by his bedside, swapped in and out between the soundtrack to _Wicked_ and Madonna's Immaculate Collection by a trembling father whose face got grayer every day. Cut after cut, every song they knew, trying to get it perfect. It never was, of course: Will could sing one guy's part, but not two, so without Puck they were kind of screwed. Then one day Will found a tape in his mailbox, unlabeled. It turned out to be Puck, singing the baritone line on all the songs in Glee's repertoire. Will handled it carefully, thinking. He figured the kids would smash it to pieces with a hammer if they found out about it. Half of him wanted to do that himself.

But he still didn't know who had been behind that locker, and maybe... well, maybe Kurt would want Puck's voice on the tape.

Will spliced it in later, not telling the kids about it.

And the rumors thrived and grew, and the newspapers were running articles on hate crimes and retrospectives on Matthew Shepard, and the guidance staff held assemblies without knowing what to say in them, and Principal Figgins kept threatening to shut down the football team until this was settled and never got around to doing it. Sue Sylvester, oddly enough, spent quite a few episodes of "That's How Sue C's It" explaining why people who did stuff like this should be cut up for shark chum, or sent into hand-to-hand combat with a couple of grizzly bears, or something. Will didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

And Mr. Hummel never left Kurt's bedside. He shut down the business until further notice and he stayed at the hospital, eating trays of hospital food brought to him by sympathetic nurses, his eyes zeroing in on them with hope distilled into desperation as they told him "stable condition" and "swelling receding" and "GCS 7." The words didn't always make sense, but he learned to read their faces. They hadn't given up hope. That was all he needed to know. He held on to that. He held on to Kurt's hand.

Then one day Kurt's eyelids started to twitch.


	3. Chapter 3

_Beating_, Ch. 3

"No. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time." Mr. Hummel's voice was concrete, gray and flat, shot through with cracks and crumbling at the edges. "He's not ready."

"I'm sorry." Will was a little taken aback. "I heard he was out of the coma, so I thought we –"

"You heard wrong." Will's stomach swooped and dropped a few feet. "He's awake. Kind of. He'll get better. That's what they say."

"I'm sorry –" Will struggled to keep his tone diplomatic, treading carefully. "He's awake, but...?"

"I don't get the medical jargon, Mr..."

"Schuster."

"Yeah. The doctors spout plenty of stuff I don't understand, but I get the gist. Far's I can see, he's awake. He opens his eyes when you talk to him. He can move some. He don't need the ventilator anymore, mostly. But he's still not totally out of the coma – don't ask me what that means, I don't know – and he's not ready for visitors. I'll let you know when he is."

"Wait – please." Will could hear Mr. Hummel starting to hang up, but he couldn't bear to leave the questions unanswered. "I know having all the Glee kids tramping in at once wouldn't be a good idea. But some of them have been asking, and I think Kurt might like to see them. They'd come alone, maybe in pairs, they wouldn't stay long – maybe you could ask Kurt what he wants, see if he can give you some sign...?"

"He screams, Mr. Schuster."

Will froze.

"My son screams. Screams and flails and I try so hard to calm him, it's all I can do, and I can't –" Burt broke off, choked out one sobbing breath, and continued. "The doctors say it's 'cause he wants to talk, wants to move better, he just gets frustrated and has to let it out. Like when he was a baby, when he had colic –" Another choking breath. "They say he'll get better, and I figure he will. He calms down if I stay with him. And then I'll be sitting there, holding his hand or stroking his hair, and then he'll look at me and smile so sweet, the way he always – ah, shit." Burt was crying openly now. Will wished he could throw the phone at the wall, hide under the table. He held the receiver away from his ear, listened to the weeping from a ways off, closing his eyes and pretending it was a television from another room, nothing to do with him at all. He pulled the phone back reluctantly when Burt started talking again: "But then when he falls asleep, he'll wake up screaming again. And that ain't about how he can't talk, it's about whatever's in his dreams." A beat. " I guess we know what that is."

"Yes," Will said. There was a long pause.

"So – look, I got to get back to Kurt." Burt's voice flattened out again. "Thanks for those CDs. I'll tell him you called."

"Great. Thank you." Will sagged against the wall. "And you'll call me when he can have visitors?" He was expecting a quick response – sure, yeah, whatever. He wasn't sure if Mr. Hummel would really call. It would be enough to get off the phone, start trying to deal with this in his own head.

Instead, there was a silence. Like Mr. Hummel was weighing something in his mind.

"Mr. Humm--"

"Look, I just got to know one thing. Then maybe I can call you, later, when things are better. But you got to tell me straight, okay?"

"Sure."

"The guy Kurt was with in the locker room. The guy who – well, you know. Was that one of your Glee kids?"

Will closed his eyes. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hummel. I have no idea."

"Was he – you know, dating – one of them?"

"Again, I don't know. I'm sorry. I wish I did."

"There's football players in your club, right?"

"Two of them. But that doesn't mean –"

"I know. But if you had to guess –"

"I couldn't. I'm really sorry."

"Don't bullshit me."

"I'm not. Seriously."

"Right." Mr. Hummel sighed. Then, his voice hardening: "Was it you?"

Will was stunned speechless for a second. "No. _No," _he said, too quickly, overcompensating in his surprise. "No. That – I'm not gay. I've never had an affair with a student," he added, belatedly. "I never would. It – no. And I don't have a football uniform," he added, senselessly.

"Okay then." Burt sighed again. "I didn't really think it was. But with you being so interested in how he was –"

"I care about him a lot. He's a special kid."

"You don't have to tell me. Look, I got to go, all right? I'll call you if he can have visitors and he wants to see some of your kids. They can write letters or whatever."

"Good. I'll have them do that."

And they did. They sent things with the letters: a tub of hand moisturizer, a Patti LuPone poster, a set of musicals on DVD. Kurt smiled when he got them, was delighted to have the nurse rub the moisturizer into his hands, watched _The Wizard of Oz _on endless repeat. Without realizing it, Burt's thoughts on the Glee kids began to shift. Before, they'd been the group who coaxed Kurt out of the closet, got him singing girls' songs in public -- the group where he probably met the guy who set this whole thing off with a locker-room blowjob. Now, they were Kurt's friends and his support system, probably the only ones who'd stand between Kurt and the worst of the world when he went back out into it. Burt knew now that he would call Will as soon as Kurt could have visitors.

But there was one visitor who didn't wait for Will's okay. A guy who sneaked in after dark, hoodie pulled up over his head and cowling his face. He sat in the waiting room, hunched over, arms holding himself together, looking like the rest of the people waiting with bloodshot eyes for news about their loved ones. And when he saw Mr. Hummel head down the hallway toward the vending machines, he got up quickly and moved into Kurt's room.

Kurt was asleep, his eyelids flickering from time to time. The guy in the hoodie glanced once over the bandages covering the left side of Kurt's head, the black and purple bruises trailing out from under it and curling along Kurt's jaw, and flinched away. Face averted, he took something out of his pocket and placed it in Kurt's hands, clasped on his stomach. Then, as Kurt began to stir, he moved fast for the door and got the hell out of there. The room was empty again by the time Kurt opened his eyes, considered the Discman.

When Burt got back into the room he asked Kurt about the Discman, but Kurt gave him a look that said he didn't know. Burt reached for the CD unit, and Kurt's fingers tightened on it –_ no, don't take it from me._ He waved a pinky in the direction of the headset. Burt didn't like it much, any of it. But he slid the headphones gently over Kurt's ears.

Kurt pressed the play button with one finger and listened for a minute. Then a smile slipped gently over his face, and he closed his eyes.

The CD was a recording of the boy who had brought the Discman, singing songs for Kurt. A cappella, soft and clear. There were some crackles in the audio here and there, some wavering in the notes. The boy had made it at home, probably singing straight into a computer microphone, burning the audio to a CD. No one else would have heard him singing; no one else would have known. No one but him and Kurt.

Kurt held the Discman close. Burt watched him. Kurt's body was relaxed. He looked peaceful. In Kurt's ears, the boy sang a ballad from _RENT_:

_Without you,_

_The eyes gaze_

_The legs walk_

_The lungs breathe_

_The mind churns_

_The heart yearns_

_The tears dry_

_Without you._

_Life goes on_

_But I'm gone_

'_Cause I die_

_Without you._

Kurt drifted off to sleep. There were no nightmares as the Discman whirred softly in the still air of the hospital room, as Kurt's clasped hands warmed the plastic shell where the music lived and the boy's voice sang softly to him through his dreams.

Outside, the boy's boots crackled on loose stones and gravel as he walked away from the hospital. Soon he was jogging. Soon after that the jogging turned into a full-out sprint. Faster and faster, breath chopping through his chest, and finally he'd reached the football field and he could collapse on the ground, press his face into the new-cut grass and scream.

What he'd just done could wreck everything. He was already sorry he'd done it. He'd never be sorry he'd done it.

And he wondered what it would be like to live the rest of his life with this kind of fear. He supposed he'd find out soon enough.


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N: Thanks for all the comments and encouragement, guys, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry that my work commitments haven't been letting me post every day, but I'll keep posting as regularly as I can. Thanks again! _

Beating, Ch. 4

Three weeks later, Kurt sent his dad home. "You can't stay here forever, Dad. Go get the business running again. I'll be here when you come to visit." He flashed his father his most charming smile. It looked almost normal; his cheekbone was healing well, and the worst of the bruising around his jaw was gone. "I'm doing okay. Get things normal at home so – so when I go home..." He fought to keep the smile going, but it slipped just a little bit.

"It'll be perfect, Kurt. Just like before..." Burt closed Kurt's hand in his own, stopping himself just short of clasping fiercely enough to hurt. "Better. We'll redo your room, get you that piano that hooks up to your computer so you can write your music real easy –"

"Arrangements for Glee." Kurt's eyes sparkled. "Thanks, Dad. But more than that... I just want to go home, and have it all be like it used to be. Settle back in. I'll be home soon."

Burt bit his lip, watching Kurt's face for a long time. "I'll visit you every day," he said finally.

"I know." Kurt smiled back.

If he cried when Burt left, no one had to know about it. Sometimes that was what you needed: time to cry alone.

But he wasn't alone very much, after all. Burt was there every day, and the Glee kids were in and out all the time, singly or in pairs, even the whole group once a week or so. Nothing was ever said about rehearsal or about regionals – Will took his cue from Kurt on that, and Kurt remained silent on the matter. Even if Kurt were out of the hospital in time, if they couldn't find a replacement for Puck they couldn't go; and no one ever, ever spoke of finding a replacement for Kurt, even if it were just to boost their numbers to qualify for the competition. If they didn't have Kurt, they didn't have Glee. Period.

But they gathered in his room, and they sang. Nothing from their official repertoire, all harmonies improvised on the fly, just picking songs they loved and making it up as they went along. Kurt took the showboat high parts, and Rachel let him. She wore an expression of great self-sacrifice, and the other kids giggled at her, but she never noticed. Why would they laugh, after all? She was perfectly sincere. She loved Kurt enough to let him be first soprano. When he came back, she'd show everyone how much she cared, how humbled she was by his strength: she'd give him her high parts then, too. Some of them.

Sometimes Kurt's showboating collapsed in on him. The beating had left him with a couple of fractured ribs and a small puncture in his lung; Will wouldn't believe it at first when Kurt told him the lung puncture had healed within two weeks, didn't want to let him sing at all at first, until he saw Kurt's gaze set cool and hard as steel and realized that his choices were either to let Kurt sing with the group or make him sing alone in his room. The lung puncture actually didn't cause too much trouble – Kurt hadn't been lying about the short recovery time – but the broken ribs still twinged now and again, and although the doctors had assured him that was normal, Kurt couldn't keep a fleeting look of fear out of his eyes, and he couldn't help breaking the note off sharply. He'd never forget the feeling of the ventilator in those first few weeks after the accident, controlling his every breath, keeping him mute and tethered to the bed. As far as he'd known then, he'd never sing again. The terror of those weeks flashed back with every twinge of his ribs – and then Rachel would burst in too loud, too fast to take over the high part, pushing sharp as often as not, and he'd look around the room and see the fear on everyone's face. The fear, and the embarrassment. No one knew what to say, but after a few weeks they'd all memorized the pattern of the floor.

Still, they came. During the day they sang with him. And at night, the boy on the CD sang to him, the boy on the CD no one else had ever heard. Kurt stowed it away carefully in his nightstand drawer each morning, hidden inside the CD case for a _Gypsy_ revival starring Tyne Daly that someone had unwisely given him one Christmas ("if it's not Merman it's got to be Patti, and if it's not Patti, thanks for the new coaster"). No one knew of its existence at all except Kurt's dad, and although he'd considered taking the headphones from Kurt in the night and listening to a bit of it more than once, he'd always decided against it. The CD was Kurt's business. No one's but Kurt's. Kurt's and the singer's.

So one day Kurt asked Will to stay a bit after the group was leaving, and when everyone else had filtered out, he asked Will to tell Puck to come see him.

Will was floored. "I... I don't know if I can, Kurt," he said, finally.

Kurt looked back at him, his eyes clear. "You have to, Mr. Schu. There's no one else who will."

"You asked..."

Kurt shook his head. "I don't need to. They won't. You know it, too."

Will did.

"I'll send you a note to give him, if you want. But I need to see him... before I leave. Before I..." Kurt looked down. "Before I have to go back there."

"You're going back to McKinley?" Will would have snatched the words back out of the air if he could have. He'd been too preoccupied with Kurt's request to keep track of what was coming out of his mouth.

But Kurt shook his head slowly. "I don't know. I meant – before I go back _there_." He tilted his head toward the window. Outside, he meant. Out into the world.

"Oh. I... right. Okay," Will said, processing slowly. "You write a note, and I'll give it to Puck. And... if he doesn't show, let me know, and I'll talk to him. I can't promise anything. But I'll talk to him."

"Thank you, Mr. Schuester." Kurt lay back on the pillow for a second, looking exhausted. Feeling badly, glancing repeatedly at the door, Will found a pen and paper, and Kurt wrote a careful message in a neat, precise hand. Will looked away until Kurt had folded it, then took it and pocketed it. "Thanks, Mr. Schu," Kurt said again, and gave him a fading smile as he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes again. He was asleep almost before Will was out the door.

His dreams were jumbled, full of narrow hallways and dark corners, brief confusing conversations and short bursts of running pell-mell down locker-lined corridors that swelled and stretched like funhouse mirrors. The people he spoke to were people he knew and didn't know, the alien melding strangely with the familiar. The voice on the CD sang to him from around corners and behind doors, and he knew the voice, but he couldn't find the singer. The voice sounded like safety and warmth and home. The voice was a mirage.

He woke up abruptly, the eerie claustrophobia of the dream still with him. He'd kicked the covers off the bed in his sleep, tossing and turning. Carefully, he swung himself partway out of bed to retrieve them. His ribs prickled; his shattered knee made movement awkward. Huddling under the blankets, he reached reflexively for the _Gypsy_ case, then stopped: for the first time, the CD didn't offer unmixed comfort. He reached for his iPod instead and pulled up a compilation of ballads sung by Bernadette Peters. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he rang for a nurse, asking for a ginger ale – and oh, by the bye, could she grab that teddy bear off the windowsill, the one with the little "From All Your Friends in Glee" tag on its paw, and hand it to him? By the time the nurse came back with the ginger ale, the little Styrofoam cup complete with a too-tall bendy straw, Kurt was asleep again, the teddy bear folded securely under his arm. But his sleep was fitful all night. Asleep or awake, he was waiting.

Then Puck came in two days later, without warning.

He came alone, in the middle of the school day. He didn't say hello, and he didn't look down at the ground or fidget nervously, the way so many visitors did. He just looked at Kurt, and if there was a little apprehension deep in his eyes, it didn't show in his bearing or the set of his jaw.

Kurt looked back with equal steadiness. He wasn't going to look down, he'd told himself, and he didn't. His voice wasn't going to shake, he'd told himself, and it didn't. Once he found his voice, the words came out clearly, his diction precise.

"You sent Brandon back to the locker room that day, didn't you?"


	5. Chapter 5

_Beating_, Ch. 5

Puck stared at Kurt for a moment, then let out a short, hard bark of a laugh. "You got a camera in here or something?" he said, looking around.

Kurt looked back at him steadily. "No. What would the point be in that? You didn't do anything illegal."

"Didn't do anything at all," Puck said, but his eyes were still trained on a point up near the ceiling.

"Puck." There was something in Kurt's voice that made Puck look back at him. "What did you do?"

After a long moment, Puck shook his head. "Nothing. I couldn't've sent Brandon back to the locker room anyway. If someone had seen me in the hallway when Brandon caught you guys half the school wouldn't be calling me a fag right now."

"I don't care." Kurt's eyes were as hard as flint. "One more time, Puck: _what did you do?"_

"I don't know what you're –"

"Puck!"

"Fine!" Puck flinched at the sound of his own voice, lowered his tone hastily. "I lifted Brandon's stupid iPhone from his gym bag and dropped it in his locker before I left, okay? I knew he'd miss it, go back to get it. He never goes anywhere without the damn thing."

"And you knew we'd be in there."

Puck's face hardened. "Yeah. I knew you'd be in there."

"So..."

"It wasn't about _you_, kid. I don't give a flying fuck –"

"Yeah, I know."

"It's –" and the word exploded from his mouth with unbelievable venom – "it's _Finn!_"

And Kurt said, "I know."

There was a long silence.

Kurt felt his eyes watering. They would not overflow. He would not cry in front of Puck. He fought the tears as Puck stared at him – Puck who was willing him to break so he'd lose the upper hand, Puck who wanted him to be weak so Puck's own weakness wouldn't show. He battled the tears as Puck waited, a smirk hiding behind his eyes.

He won.

"When did you find out about us?" he asked, and his voice was as steady as it had ever been.

Puck looked down. "Like a week before... before this shit went down. I walked in on you myself." Puck grimaced. "I got out fast. Neither of you noticed me."

"No," Kurt murmured. "And I take it you decided that that meant you were entitled to Quinn?"

"She needed to know! Christ knows why she picked that asshole in the first place – he won't support her, he has no fucking clue what he's doing – he's wandering around –"

"Blah, blah, blah – Puck, I don't _care._" Kurt's eyes were snapping. "So you caught him cheating –"

"With a fucking _dude!"_

"Immaterial. You –"

"Like hell! She's dating a fucking _fag –"_

"_Let me talk!" _Kurt was shouting now, and his broken rib caught against soft tissue somewhere. He let out a short moan, and Puck flinched and cast a quick look over his shoulder, checking for a nurse coming down the hallway. "No. _No," _Kurt said, catching his breath. "I'm fine. I'm fine," he repeated.

_Crock of shit,_ Puck thought. But Kurt was still talking:

"So you wanted Quinn for yourself. Why not just tell her?"

"She wasn't going to believe me," Puck muttered. "She knows I have a thing for her. She'd ask Finn and he'd lie and she'd believe him."

Kurt's eyes had gone blank. "So you set Brandon up to catch us."

"Yeah." And Puck waited for Kurt to say something, but Kurt's eyes remained blank, glazed over. Suddenly Puck found words spilling out of his mouth of their own volition: "I didn't think anything like this was going to happen. I swear I didn't. I thought – Brandon was supposed to see Finn, and, yeah, he was supposed to tell people so Quinn would hear and – and whatever, man, but it wasn't about you, Christ, everyone already knows you're a flamer, I figured there wasn't anything that mattered to –"

A shiver wracked Kurt's body. "Nothing that mattered." His gaze was a hundred miles away. "I had Finn. For – for just a few weeks, Finn and I..."

"Jesus. _That's _what you care about?" Puck stared at him in frank disgust. "You're worrying about losing your _boyfriend?" _

The breath that Kurt drew was so sharp that Puck thought his cracked rib had caught in his lung again. It seemed like forever before he exhaled. When he spoke, it was in a flat, dead voice:

"They thought I would be mentally retarded for the rest of my life. Did you know that?" Puck stared at him warily, didn't answer. "The swelling went down and I started to get better, and the doctors wouldn't believe it at first. The first time I could see and think again I looked at my dad and he'd lost fifteen pounds. In three weeks."

Puck looked down at the floor, shifted a foot from side to side. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean –"

But Kurt continued on as if he hadn't heard him. "The doctors told me I would probably have amnesia about the day... the day it happened. They said that usually happens. I don't." His voice took on a strange, singsong tone, almost hypnotic: "The car was tracking me, driving too slow, and I knew they were after me and I didn't know what to do. They had tinted windows and I couldn't see in. They pulled up behind me and I started to run. I thought maybe I could make Main Street, flag down someone to help. I couldn't."

"Kurt –"

"One of them grabbed me from behind and threw me down on my face. My knee smashed when it hit the pavement and that was it."

"I never meant to –"

"I never saw one of their faces. It's pointless, isn't it? The doctors said I should have amnesia. I remember every detail, but I never saw their faces. I just saw their shoes. Football cleats." Kurt sounded almost dreamy now, but his face was frozen in a rictus of pain. "It happened so fast, but I think my ribs must have broken first and punctured my lung, because almost as soon as I fell, I couldn't breathe. They were kicking me in the back over and over, and I thought they'd break my spine. My good luck that they didn't. One of the spikes from some guy's cleat almost took out my left eye. Good luck again." Puck's eyes were closed, battling the images. "But then something hit my temple and it all went black." His voice became small. "When I woke up I was here. And with all the fluorescent lights, the white ceiling... I thought I was dead. I thought I was in heaven." Finally, finally, his eyes traveled back to Puck's face. "This isn't heaven, though."

Puck had nothing to say.

"Do you know who did it?" Kurt whispered.

Puck swallowed, shook his head a little. "I wasn't there. I..."

"You must have heard things. Do you know?"

Puck's head was still shaking. "I don't know. No one told me... I'm not sure..."

"You're lying, Puck."

"No. No, I..."

"Then go." Kurt's voice was pure ice. "If you won't tell me, then go. I have nothing else to say to you."

Puck went.


	6. Chapter 6

_Beating_, Ch. 6

"You're looking good, Kurt." Mercedes, sitting by the side of Kurt's bed in the chair his father had occupied for so long, slapped Kurt's good knee lightly. "You feeling any better?"

Kurt smiled, picking up a tin of makeup from his nightstand and waving it at her. "Thanks to you. Do you know before you brought me this I was working with makeup from the _drugstore?_ And completely the wrong shade, I might add." His fingers trailed lightly over his cheek and jaw, the fading bruises there now skillfully camouflaged with Kevyn Aucoin's Sensual Skin Enhancer. "I really can't thank you enough."

Mercedes laughed. "Ain't that the truth! I'm all up in Sephora going through the whitefolks' makeup, and the salesgirl's coming up to me every two seconds going 'Can I help you, ma'am?' I finally told her, "Girl, if I was looking to steal some makeup, I sure wouldn't be wasting my time in y'all's store. You see anything in here that'll match my skin?'" Kurt was giggling with her by now. "She started telling me, 'Oh, well we have a _broad _range of product lines...' and that's when I plugged in my headphones to look for your stuff in peace. MAC's the only place for a black girl to shop."

"I'll keep that in mind," Kurt told her, and they both laughed. But Kurt was toying with the tin, rolling it restlessly between his fingers, and Mercedes wasn't one to miss much.

"But enough about that. Yeah, you're looking better. But how are you feeling?"

Kurt tried to keep his tone light. "Fine. The doctor says everything's going fine."

Mercedes leveled a keen glance at him. "Don't shit me, now."

Kurt sighed and slumped against the pillow. "It's true. It really is, all right? They're taking the catheter out on Thursday. And even with this thing –" he touched the wheeled IV pole beside his bed lightly – "I got up and down the hallway a few times yesterday on the crutches."

"Hey, that's great news!"

But Kurt didn't look like it was great news as he continued: "They're talking about letting me out in two weeks or so."

Mercedes was about to let out a whoop and descend on Kurt with a hug, but she caught sight of the look on his face in time. "Baby, if you're getting out of here in two weeks... isn't that good news?"

Kurt gave a slight nod. "I guess so. Sure."

"Then why are you looking like that? What's wrong?"

Kurt closed his eyes, not knowing how to answer. Mercedes had been a great friend and a rock-solid support through all of this; she visited him most days, and she was the only one who consistently came alone. She'd never treated him like she pitied him, never acted like she was scared of him. If there was anyone he could trust to talk to it was Mercedes... but...

Those football cleats, kicking and stomping. Concrete and gravel cutting into his face as a spiked heel cleaved into his cheek. _Fucking fag. Cocksucker. _Gasping for breath, gagging on the taste of his own blood. A foot on his neck, a voice in his ear: _Who was it? Who the fuck were you with, you queer-ass motherfucker? _Choking, coughing, unable to answer, but shaking his head no, no, he wouldn't tell, _no. _A vicious kick to his Adam's apple, sobbing with no breath and no voice, a snippet of thought flashing through splintering consciousness – _can't breathe can't talk never sing again –_ and then his temple smashing in and it was over -- but it would never be over, would it? They were still there, the boys with their football cleats, walking the halls of McKinley and walking the streets, too. And even if they were caught, even if they were put away for life, there would always be more of them, wouldn't there? If he were incredibly lucky he might live a life full of hate-filled looks, obscene remarks, flashbacks and panic attacks every time another newspaper told him of another hate crime committed against a boy like him. Less lucky: another beating or two, less severe than the first, maybe some muggings where he got called a fag while he emptied his wallet or his coat was torn from his back.

And unlucky: another beating like this.

Very unlucky: dead.

Mercedes saw it all on his face. She couldn't speak for a moment either, listening to Kurt draw ragged breaths, letting him be. Then, quietly: "You're afraid."

Kurt nodded.

"Are you going back to McKinley?"

Kurt closed his eyes.

Because he was scared of McKinley, oh, God, was he scared of McKinley, but the fear was everywhere, it would stalk him with every step he took for the rest of his life. But there was something else at McKinley, something he wasn't sure he could face along with all the rest of it --

_Man_, that's _what_ _you care about? You're worrying about losing your _boyfriend_?_

Mercedes' face was set in firm lines that told him she would hear whatever he had to say and never judge a word of it, but every time Kurt tried to concentrate on her, reality morphed strangely and what he saw was Puck. The look on Puck's face when he'd slipped up and mentioned Finn, the look that told him how revolting he was and how incomprehensibly foolish, too, lost in schoolboy fantasies of love after what had happened to him. And then, too... the way Finn always hung at the back of the room when the group came to visit, never came on his own, never even met Kurt's eyes...

"It's a bad place." He hadn't known he was going to say that, and the words surprised him. Mercedes squeezed his hand.

"You do whatever you need to do, baby. You know if you come back, we got your back."

Kurt smiled at her. "I certainly know that you do." Mercedes reached down to hug him.

Eventually she straightened up. Both their eyes were bright with tears, and Kurt sighed. "Sometimes I do want to give up, you know? Walk away from McKinley and never look back. Move out of Lima, even. But – would it be any better anywhere else?" Mercedes studied his face silently, knowing she had no answer. "And at McKinley... maybe it would be best to stay there. You said a lot of the kids are angry about what happened."

Mercedes nodded emphatically. "Oh, honey, they are bullshit. We did a day of silence for you, did I tell you? About three-quarters of the kids at school did not say one word for a whole day. Not at school and not at home. We wore signs around our necks explaining that if you were silent – you were still in the coma – we were gonna be too. A bunch of us got sent to the principal for not answering teachers, so we all wound up overflowing into the hall, sitting there cross-legged with the signs. After school we did a march, answered reporters with note cards."

"No one told me this," Kurt said quietly.

"There was so much going on. And it was kind of chaotic at school." Mercedes sighed. "Figgins wanted to sweep it under the carpet, you know, 'cause of the football players who... he figured it could get real messy, so there was some fighting with the administration about it. But it didn't stop. We had candlelight vigils every night until you were out of the coma –"

"My dad told me about that."

"And the black armbands. A lot of us still wear those. And – you got all the cards, right?" Mercedes looked around the room. "I never noticed. Where'd they go?"

Kurt looked down. "I got them. I mean, Dad gets them. He's been holding them for me. I just... I haven't been able to read them yet. I guess I haven't been ready."

Mercedes nodded. "Whatever you need to do. But if you want to read them you better start soon, 'cause you got hundreds of them stacked up by now." Kurt smiled, but his mind was on something she'd said a minute ago. He glanced up at her.

"You held a day of silence. And you wear black armbands?"

"Every day." A corner of her mouth quirked up. "None of us wear them in here 'cause it looks kind of depressing. It's not like you're dead –"

Kurt gave a laugh that surprised Mercedes with its naturalness. "Not that I've noticed, no."

" – but we all agreed: the day you get out of the hospital is the day we take the armbands off. We're not letting anyone forget what went down that day." Her gaze hardened. "Especially not those football players."

"But don't you worry about being hurt?" Kurt asked softly, and his eyes were haunted.

"No." Mercedes met his gaze squarely. "There's too many of us. They can't fight us all."

Kurt was silent for a long moment. "Maybe..." He looked back up at Mercedes. "Maybe I can..."

He didn't finish the sentence, but he didn't need to. And Mercedes kept holding his hand, and they let the silence be, a tenuous peace settling into the space between them.

But across town Will was sitting in Principal Figgins' office, and what he had just heard had left him white-knuckling the arms of the chair he was sitting in to keep himself from lunging across the desk. "No," he said, his voice cracked and dry as a parched riverbed. "No, there's no way. You can't do this."

"I'm sorry, Will, but I cannot –"

"No!" Will leapt up and began pacing. His sleeve caught a trinket on the edge of the principal's desk, and it thudded to the floor. "I'm not letting you do this, how could you possibly even think --? It's illegal –"

"It is at my sole discretion –"

"It absolutely is not!"

"_Sit down, Will!" _Will didn't. He stood stock-still, and Principal Figgins' words hit him like a slap in the face. "When he is out of the hospital, that boy will not be returning to my school!"


	7. Chapter 7

_Beating_, Ch. 7

Principal Figgins would never know how close he came to having his neck wrung in the five seconds after he said those nine words to Will Schuester.

"I expect your support on this, Will," Figgins added, incredibly.

Will had a vision of the top of his head rocketing off, steam shooting from his skull and out of his ears like something out of Looney Tunes. "You want my _support? _ Did I actually just hear you say that? You want my _support_ in _expelling Kurt Hummel?" _

"It's not an expulsion. If you would listen –"

"Listen! You want me to listen to this!"

"I am still in charge of this school, and you are my employee, and you will sit down and hear what I have to tell you! Understood?"

"No." But Will sat down anyway. Something seemed to be wrong with his knees.

"It is _not_ an expulsion." Principal Figgins settled into his chair again, clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. "We simply don't have the resources to accommodate a student with his medical issues at the moment."

"Then find them. You're mandated by law to be accessible to all students."

Figgins' gaze shifted to something over Will's shoulder. "We're not entirely clear on that point..."

"So hire a lawyer."

"We don't have the funds for that."

"You've got to be kidding me!"

"Have you seen our budget for this year? The school board –"

"This is unbelievable! What are you planning on doing when Mr. Hummel sues you?"

Figgins sighed. "We're hoping it won't come to that."

"How could it not!"

Figgins glanced up sharply. "Why are you so sure the boy wants to come back to McKinley, Will? Have you been pressuring him to return?"

"Of course not. I –"

"For your Glee club competition? Is that what this is about?"

"No! How can you even suggest --!"

"Here's what I'm telling you." Figgins leaned forward again. "McKinley is not a good environment for that boy right now. We don't even have a regular nurse dedicated to our school –" Figgins shot Will an owlish glance, and Will flinched. Principal Figgins had held him responsible for the fiasco with Terri and the decongestants for months now. " – and it's not fair to the other students to allow for potential disruption..."

"I don't believe I'm hearing this. You're worrying about _Kurt_ disrupting the _other_ kids?"

"Not just about that." Figgins' voice grew stronger. "This is in his best interests as well. We still don't know who was part of that attack. And between that, and the fact that many of the other students may be... under the circumstances, might see him as... treat him in a way..."

Will cut him off. "You're saying that because some of the students might be homophobic, the solution is to kick Kurt out. And that –"

And now Figgins' face was carved from stone. "Listen to me carefully on this, Will: _we cannot keep this boy safe." _

Will sucked in a breath, but couldn't find any words. When he finally spoke, he heard his own voice faltering, stumbling over things he'd already said:

"It's not legal. You have a responsibility to accommodate all students."

"We have a responsibility to keep our students _safe_. And I am sure that, once we explain this to Mr. Hummel, he will agree. Returning to McKinley would be detrimental to Kurt's physical and emotional health –"

"You can't be sure –"

" – and things are too explosive right now. If Kurt came back and were... if he were hurt again, we _would_ be legally responsible for that. That is not a responsibility we can undertake at present."

Will was silent, but his silence wasn't the silence of consent. Figgins could read the difference on his face.

"What is this really about, Will? If it isn't about your competition –"

"It's not about the _competition_." Will's voice could have frosted lava. "It's about... Have you been to see Kurt in the hospital?"

Principal Figgins shifted uncomfortably. "Of course not. I didn't think it appropriate –"

"I have. With the Glee kids. And when he's with them..." Will shook his head. "I mean, he's not the same kid anymore. Not like he was before... You can see it, the way his eyes dart around, the way he jumps at sudden noises, at shadows..."

"Which is exactly the point I'm making –"

"No. It isn't. Because when he's with his friends – when he's singing with the group, when he's a part of Glee – that's when you can see the old Kurt." Will sat forward, looked Figgins straight in the eye. "Glee is good for him right now, and I'm not letting you take it away from him."

"You _don't have any choice._ How many times do I have to tell you? Kurt will finish out the school year at home, with a private tutor –"

"Funded by the school?"

"Stop interrupting me!" Figgins' eyes had dodged over Will's shoulder again. "That will be... we'll discuss with his father... anyway, he'll be tutored at home at least through the end of the year. Next year, when his medical issues have resolved..."

"They're letting him out of the hospital in a few weeks..."

"_When his medical issues have resolved_, and when things have, uh, _settled_ a bit here, then we'll reconsider. Perhaps. Until then, he'll have no formal association with McKinley High." Figgins fought for a kind smile, not too successfully. "You and your students can continue to – uh – rehearse with him, sing with him, meet in groups, whatever you feel is best..."

"But if he's not a part of McKinley, he's not a part of Glee."

"Not officially..."

"Then he can't take part in the after-school rehearsals. In any of our school performances. In sectionals –"

"So it is about the competition!"

"It's about _Kurt!" _Will's voice was rapidly turning ragged. Why was he still fighting about this, anyway? Figgins wasn't going to change his mind. This conversation was going nowhere. There was no way to make Figgins see...

_Kurt's eyes sparkling out from a spectacular explosion of bruises smudged black and purple from his temple to his jaw, smile barely revealing the space where two teeth had been knocked out at the side of his mouth... Laughing with the Gleeks, dueling with Rachel for high notes, and the shadows were pushed to the back of his eyes for as long as the singing went on – _How could you make someone see that unless they'd been there? How could you explain what it meant to rip the last shred of a normal, happy teenage life from a kid who'd been drop-kicked straight into the worst of what adulthood could ever bring to bear?

_And he wouldn't care._ That was what Will could see in Figgins' eyes now, reflected off opaque irises as he made a show of bending over some papers on his desk. Even if Figgins could see all of that, even if he could understand it, he wouldn't care.

Will got up and left the office.


	8. Chapter 8

_A/N: My apologies for how long it's taking me to finish this thing! I haven't ditched it, and there are only a few more chapters. Again, thank you to everyone who's commented. I've been meaning to reply to specific comments and haven't yet gotten around to it, because I am a jerk. But I really do appreciate it. Also, to the commenter who noted that there are in fact four football players in Glee, not two: this is a very good point. :) I tend to think of Mike and Matt (??) as "those two other random dudes who got cast to round out the male hamonies," and have never paid them much attention. Fangirl!fail, clearly. Anyway, I apologize for any other stupid errors I may have missed (or may make in the future)... thanks for reading, everyone! _

_Beating_, Ch. 8

At the precise moment that Principal Figgins called Kurt's father to explain to him the many inventive reasons why Mr. Hummel should not sue the school for refusing to allow Kurt to resume attendance there, Kurt woke up to find Puck standing by his bedside.

Puck didn't say hello or offer any greeting, and he didn't blink or look away. It seemed to be his M.O., Kurt thought disjointedly, pushing himself into an upright position. Then:

"Nathan Coffey, Eric McKee, and Hayden Gray."

Kurt stared at him. "What?"

"You asked what I heard. That's what I heard. Nathan, Eric, and Hayden."

"That's..." Kurt closed his eyes, head throbbing. He hadn't been prepared for this. "That's who..."

Puck didn't help him out. Kurt opened his eyes again.

"But Eric always left me alone before," he said. A bit of unspoken subtext: _Not like you._

Puck shrugged. "I don't know. He lives up Hayden's way, hitches a ride home from practice with him sometimes. Could've stayed back in the car, maybe. All I heard was he was there."

"There were three sets of cleats."

Puck shrugged again. In a weird way, Kurt was grateful for his casual attitude. He was pretty sure a pitying look would have done him in right about now.

"What am I..." Kurt struggled to focus. He'd been so sure he wanted to know this – no, needed to know this – thinking this would change things somehow, knowing who to fear, or who to hate. But now – so what? Knowing who the three guys were didn't change his fear of every other potential attacker, which in the end meant pretty much everyone who hadn't worked to earn his trust over time. What it meant was having three faces to put to the faceless creatures in his nightmares. What it meant was knowing that a kid like Eric, an ordinary kid who'd always left him alone, could turn around one day and start kicking his spine in. What it meant was three hotspots of terror in a world full of fear.

"Who else knows?" he asked. _Who else is protecting them? Who else is letting them get away with it?_

"Some of the football team, I guess." Puck shrugged, yet again, and Kurt could tell he was getting uncomfortable. "Not all of them. Joe Cook let on to me the other night."

"Does Finn know?" Kurt absolutely could not stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth.

Puck shook his head. "Doubt it. Joe was drunk or he wouldn't have told me. The only reason the guys talk to me anymore is to score weed, anyway. And half the school thinks Finn's your boyfriend."

"Did you tell..."

Puck tried for a hard look, but he couldn't quite hide the shame in his eyes. "No. Look, Finn's an idiot and he doesn't deserve Quinn, but that doesn't mean I want him killed, for Christ's sake."

Kurt glanced down at his hands, curled around the edge of the blanket. "So they're still in the mood to be killing people, then. Well, best to know now."

"No..." _Don't start with the sympathetic tone. Do not do it. I will stay put together until you leave as long as you don't start pitying me now. _Puck obliged, barely. "No one's going to give you shit if you come back." Kurt didn't miss the phrasing: _if_, not _when._ Well, Puck had never been stupid. "Things have settled down for now, and you've got most of the school in your corner. But I'm not going to stir things up again by talking shit about Finn."

"Good." Then Kurt gathered his courage and looked Puck straight in the eye. "And what about the guys who did it? Nathan, Hayden? Eric?"

"They're not going to mess with you any—"

"No." Kurt's blue eyes had gone gunmetal gray. "What are you going to do about them?"

"_Me?"_ Puck couldn't hide his astonishment. "What the hell are you talking about, what am I going to do about them? You asked me who they were. I told you. That's all –"

"I can go to the police and tell them –"

"The fucking _police? _Are you demented? You want to start it all up again? Christ!"

"-- tell them you said Joe said they did it, but at third-hand –"

"Don't bring me into this!"

"You're already in it!" The scorn in Kurt's voice snapped like a live wire. "What did you think, I was going to figure 'oh, how wonderful to know all of this, I'll just hide in a locker whenever I see one of them, how kind of Puck to tell me'? They –"

"You asked, I answered. That's –"

"—beat me to a pulp and left me for dead –"

"—shut _up_, man, that's all I can do!" But Puck was jumpy now, edgy, unable to look Kurt in the face. "It's all I can do," he repeated.

And suddenly Kurt's voice was calm. "No, it isn't. And you know what –" Puck glanced up, found Kurt's gaze trained steady on his face. "You know it, too." Kurt gave it a second. "You're better than this."

_No, I'm not, _Puck thought. But how could you say that?

_And –_ The thought slipped in unbidden. _And what if I am? What then? _

They were still silent, Puck struggling for an answer and trying not to read it in Kurt's face, when Kurt's eyes slipped over Puck's shoulder and his face went white.

"What –" Puck glanced back. "Oh, man, are you kidding me?" He turned back to Kurt. "Later. I am definitely not hanging around for this." On his way out the door he gave the guy standing there a hard nudge with his shoulder.

Finn stumbled, then caught himself against the doorjamb. "Hey, Kurt," he said.


	9. Chapter 9

Hello, readers, if in fact there are any of you left – I'm so sorry for the long delay! Things have been crazy lately (holiday season, need I say more?), but I've not abandoned this, so here's a new chapter. I don't think it's a particularly _good_ new chapter, but here it is. Heh. Anyway, though it's three days early for Christmas and a day late for Solstice and I don't know how far off for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, let's consider it a gift for the holidays. Have a good one, everyone, no matter what you celebrate!

Oh, P.S., I was trying to figure out where exactly this fits in Gleek 'verse – before it had been just generic AU, but since Finn broke up with Quinn in Sectionals, the fic needed some kind of timeline, given that in the fic Finn is still with Quinn. So I made a semi-random choice, and now it officially goes AU from "Ballad" on.

To the fic...

BEATING

Chapter 10

"Hey," Kurt said. His brain seemed to have shifted into slow motion.

"Okay if I..." Finn gestured into the room, then began to move forward, then rocked back on his heels and started playing with the zipper on his jacket. It would have been funny under other circumstances.

"Come in," Kurt replied, gesturing at the seat that Puck had vacated. Finn sat gingerly.

"So..."

"Yes," Kurt said. He wasn't really sure what that meant, but it was better than endless fidgety silence. Sort of.

"So – uh, what was Puck doing here, anyway?" Finn asked, jerking his head toward the doorway.

"Oh – that." Kurt paused, considering. "I guess he was deciding whether he's going to be a man."

"What?"

"Forget it." Another pause. Kurt let his eyes stray along Finn's jaw, clenched in fear. _Fear of what? What does he think is going to happen here? _"Is that why you're here?" he asked suddenly.

"What? I... what?" Finn stood, started pacing. "Sorry. I... look, I'm sorry. I just..."

"Understandable." Kurt pulled his lips into a tight half-smile for a second, then let it go. "Why are you here, Finn?"

"I'm here because... I wanted..." Finn stopped, ran a hand through his hair. "Shit. I'm sorry. I just – you know?" He waved a hand helplessly, as though Kurt might know.

"No. I don't. Sorry." Once again, the thin half-smile. "If it would help, though, maybe I could guess?" Finn eyed him warily. Kurt went on. "One, you decided it might be nice to pop in at the hospital for a friendly visit – comfort the afflicted and all that? So you dropped by. For the first time. In two months."

"Yeah – I –"

"Two," Kurt continued, "you came by to apologize for not visiting for two months – okay, great, let's hold that for later," he said, waving Finn off. "Three would be that you came to explain why you never visited, and frankly I'm more interested in that than in apologies."

Finn plopped back into the chair, still running his hands through his hair, which was beginning to stick up in spiky tufts. "I know. You're right. I just..." Kurt stared at him, unblinking. He was running high on adrenaline, noticing every detail of Finn's appearance, every waver and crack in Finn's voice hitting his ears sharp and crisp; somehow, though, he found himself observing the scene calmly and clearly. He'd been anticipating this meeting for so long, envisioning different scenarios, hope and fear intermingling. Now, finally, he was going to find out what was what. If Finn would ever say anything.

"Please," Kurt said quietly, and Finn looked up. And for the first time since he'd come into the room, what he was seeing was Kurt. Not the face that had been plastered on protest posters and the front pages of newspapers for months, becoming more impersonal as it gained iconic status; not the face of a victim, weak and small against the white hospital sheets. Not the face of the tragic hero in the overheated soap opera that Finn imagined his life to be, a figure who would point at Finn to proclaim a "_J'accuse!" _in woeful tones. It was Kurt. Just Kurt.

Not that Kurt had ever been simple. But somehow, Finn had always been able to talk to him. It was no different now.

"Look, what you said about being a man –"

"Yes?"

"That's what I want to do. I want to man up."

Kurt stared at him, poker-faced. "I'm sorry. What does that mean? To you, that is."

"It means... oh, man. Look, I'm really sorry I never visited. Like, alone. I mean, I did, but I didn't know how to... you were asleep, so I..."

"The CD," Kurt said, and a vein twitched in his neck. "I got it."

"Yeah. But after that... I chickened out. I didn't know how to deal with – everything, and... and I was scared."

"Scared of the kids at school? Scared that someone would hurt you?"

"I guess... yeah... but no. I mean, yeah, obviously, but..." Finn paused, let out a long breath. "Okay. I got to explain this."

"Please do." Kurt arched an eyebrow. "Honestly, I haven't understood a thing you've said in the last ten minutes."

Finn huffed out a short half-laugh. "Right. Okay."

Kurt waited.

"So... look. What we were doing..." A blush was already starting to rise in Finn's cheeks. "We never – you know, talked about it. It was just sort of... you know..."

"Yes." And this time Kurt did know. The moment in Finn's attic, helping him to place his father's tie around his neck, when he'd found his face tipped up to Finn's, the light scent of Finn's aftershave flooding his nostrils. The way Finn's face had inclined towards his in tiny increments, and how he'd frozen inches away, poised on the brink of a leap he'd never be able to take on his own. And the way Kurt had reached up to touch Finn's face, how he'd gently – so gently – pressed Finn's eyelids closed. And that was what Finn had needed, and they had kissed. And from then on, through everything they had done, through weeks of locked-room trysts and bogus "study sessions" after school in Finn's bedroom, Finn's eyes had been closed.

Kurt's eyes, of course, were always open.

"So... I mean, I didn't even know what to call it – well, okay, not like I didn't know the _words_, but –"

"I know.."

"I just didn't... think of it like that. It was like... oh, I don't know. Like, Quinn and the baby and football and college and all of that stuff, that was just... what I figured my life was. And then you and me... man, I just didn't know how to handle it. And... even though I wanted it..." He shook his head. "I just didn't know how to deal with it, or... I don't know, how to think of it as part of my life."

"Finn, I know all of that." Kurt sighed. "I've always known that."

Finn looked a little surprised. :"I don't think I knew all of that until I started thinking about it all in the last couple weeks."

"I knew that, too," Kurt said, and smiled.

"Yeah... well," Finn said, fidgeting. "When you got... when you got beat up... I totally freaked. And I went totally chickenshit. I'm not gonna lie. Like, here you are, and this thing we had going... _whatever_ we had going.... I don't know, but then you're in a coma and it was all my fault." Finn's voice had gone ragged. "_All_ my fault. And –"

"It wasn't all your fault." Kurt wanted, badly, to reach out and take Finn's hand. He quelled the impulse. "Hate's not your fault, Finn. What those guys did isn't your fault. And I've been gay all my life – I mean, people walking past me in the street can see it. It could have been anyone, anytime. It just happened to be you."

"Yeah, it just happened to be me," Finn said, his voice thick with bitterness. "Only I was the one behind the locker."

"Yeah, you were," Kurt said.

"I... oh, _shit, _Kurt, I'm so sorry, I'm so _fucking_ sorry –"

"It's all right. Finn. It's okay. I'm okay now. It's all right." And now he was holding Finn's hand, letting Finn's tears splash down on their intertwined knuckles. And now, again, Finn's eyes were closed.

"And I want to _stop _all this bullshit," Finn cried eventually, voice still choked. "I don't want to be banging around and trying to _pretend_ shit anymore. I don't want to be hiding and I don't want to always be trying not to think about you, I mean, us, I want to _be _there for you, 'cause I know I fucked it all up the last time, I just... like I didn't even know who I was or what any of it meant... but I should have _been_ here. I should have been here," he repeated, loud and vehement.

"Yes, you should have," Kurt said. Now his eyes were trained on their clasped hands.

"So I want to fix it," Finn said, after a long pause.

Kurt glanced up. "How were you planning on doing that?"

Finn laid his other hand over Kurt's. _Oh my God, he looks like he's about to propose,_ Kurt thought, and a slightly hysterical laugh began to bubble up in his throat. But what Finn was offering was a proposal of sorts:

"I want to be with you now. No more hiding. I can't stay with Quinn anymore – shit, I think she's about to dump me anyway, I've been so spaced these last few weeks – and... when you come back to McKinley, I want to be with you."

Kurt looked at him. He meant it.

"Oh, God," he said. Finn's brow creased a bit; he looked mildly confused. That wasn't the reaction he'd been expecting. The confusion froze on his face as Kurt swallowed hard, once, and explained:

"I can't. I can't be with you."


	10. Chapter 10

A/N: Happy '10, everyone! Here's Chapter 10 to celebrate. (Yes, I labeled the previous chapter "Chapter 10" too. I'm a writer, I never said I could count.) I thought this was going to be the last chapter before the epilogue, but now I think there's going to be one more and then an epilogue. Either way, we're nearing a close, at which point I expect to repress my instinct to write hurt/comfort stories that put poor Kurt through hell and try something light and fun for a change. :) Anyway, thanks again for reading...

CHAPTER TEN (for real this time)

"Can't?" Finn said blankly. "What do you mean, can't?"

"What I said. I can't."

"But... I mean... we _did," _Finn said, and Kurt had to choke back a giggle at the look on Finn's face. "I mean, we... I don't understand."

Kurt bit his lip, marshaled both the giggles and the sarcasm, and tried to find the words that were left in the space they'd vacated. "Things are different now, Finn. We can't go back to the way things were. What happened..." Kurt tried to find words for it, the way the rose-tinged, giddy times he'd shared with Finn seemed cleaved off from the antiseptic-scented present with a knife. The way he knew they'd never be the same couple because he wasn't the same person anymore, how he'd been kicked and punched and shattered and shoved into a grown-up world that Finn couldn't be part of. That was a part of who he was now, and it was what he would be dealing with for years, if not forever. He couldn't handle a relationship now, too. And if he could, he couldn't have handled a relationship with Finn.

"Is it because you think I'll get beaten up?" Finn asked, unsure how to read the silence. "Because I can take care of myself. I swear."

Kurt gritted his teeth against a brief backwash of bitter words. _Three of them, Finn? One holding your arms behind your back while the other two stomp you with cleats, pound your head against the pavement, try to crack your spine, your skull – you can take care of yourself? You can handle that? _It took him several breaths to regain his control. Finn didn't know that, didn't know the way it was. Maybe he should have, but he didn't. "You can't take care of yourself," he said eventually, neutrally, "not if they want to take you down. But... no, I'm not really worried about that. There are ways to be more careful, but you'll figure that out on your own if you go with some other guy sometime. For you and me... I'm not worried, because we..." He tried to say "It's over." The words wouldn't quite come. He fell back on, "We can't."

"No, but don't you get it?" Finn strode back and forth, agitated. "You're all, 'we can't go back to the way things were,' but that's it, because I can't go back to the way things were either. I mean, before you and me, and all of that. I can't go back from it now. I know this about myself now, right? I can't go back."

Kurt sighed. They were going to have to do this the long way "Okay. What do you know about yourself?"

"I... I like you."

Kurt cursed himself internally for the flush that rose to his cheeks at that, the impulse to smile. He favored Finn with a cool, diamond-cut gaze to compensate. "So you're gay."

"I – well – see..." Finn bit his lip, twisted his fingers together. "No, I'm serious, though, it's just, like, how could I have gotten Quinn pregnant –" Kurt cut his eyes down – "I mean, I was really into her, right? I mean, not, like _that_, but –" Now Finn's face was bright red, and Kurt looked vaguely puzzled. "I mean, maybe what I had going with you felt more... more..."

"More what?" Kurt's voice was quiet now. Tense. And uncharacteristically, Finn decided to take a breath before he spoke, gather his thoughts.

"You were nicer to me," was what he said in the end. "Quinn's hot, duh. So are you," he added hurriedly, as Kurt's eyebrow shot up in a dangerous way. "That wasn't it. It's just... I could talk to you. It wasn't all messing around, all wanting stuff I could never get –" _Never get?_ Kurt was beginning to get an inkling of why it was that Puck was so sure that Finn couldn't be the father, and his own sense of Finn's intellectual deficiencies was ballooning as a result – "but even though you – even though we – you know, I –"

"Got it?" Kurt suggested, deadpan. Finn's face was now beyond beet-red; the color and the round, wide eyes combined reminded Kurt of Elmo from Sesame Street.

"Yeah... well, what I'm trying to say is, that's not all it was with us. You talked to me about stuff, when I was having a hard time or whatever. I never felt like you were playing me." Finn's voice had dropped low. "I really liked that about us, Kurt."

Kurt was silent for a long moment, eyes cast down. Because Finn was right in a way, and oh, God, what Kurt wouldn't give to go back to those times, when they'd been falling slow but steady into a relationship that felt like something solid, something real. Something that wasn't just blowjobs in locker rooms, or frantic makeout sessions behind locked bedroom doors with music blaring loud to cover their moans. It was the leap Kurt had taken in telling Finn about his mom, the scent of her lingering in a room she'd left ten years ago, and the way Finn had understood a little bit and cared enough to make up for what he didn't understand. It was the leap Finn had taken in telling Kurt how he felt about his baby girl, the child he'd probably never know. They'd shared those things, and others, too – the stresses of everyday life in the fishbowl world of high school, what it meant to be special in a place and time that didn't care for that at all. What they'd had had gone deeper than an average high school relationship of negotiating sex acts and evaluating degrees of virginity. Kurt had been infatuated with Finn from the first time he'd seen him, but it was over the few weeks that they'd been together that he'd started to understand how separate "love" was from "infatuation" – and to understand that for him and Finn, love might actually be in the cards someday.

And then he'd been beaten. And Finn had never visited him.

Kurt was smart enough to know that that didn't negate the possibility of love. What it did mean was that whether or not the two of them were in love, or ever could be, might be beside the point. If Finn let his fear take over, then that would be it.

"But you said you wanted to man up," he whispered. Finn craned his neck to hear.

"What?"

Kurt sighed. His heart was jackrabbiting now, his earlier calm having deserted him. When he spoke, the words were very precise, very deliberate. "Finn, when I asked if you were gay, you said –"

Finn twisted a foot back and forth on the floor. "Kurt, it's not that – I just don't think – because Quinn, and, you know, I mean, I _like_ girls, but –"

"Okay." Kurt sighed again. "You like girls. And guys?"

"I... guess?"

"So you're bisexual?"

"I..." Finn's face had returned to Elmo-shade. "Is that what you call that?"

Kurt could have laughed. Almost. "Yes. If you're sexually attracted to girls and guys, you're bisexual."

"So then... I guess... but I don't know," Finn blurted. "I just like you."

"Not guys? Just me?"

Finn shrugged helplessly.

A thin smile twined around the edges of Kurt's mouth. "So you're Kurt-sexual, then."

"Is that a thing?" Finn asked, and Kurt burst out laughing After a second, Finn joined in.

"I don't know," Kurt said finally, recovering. "I know..." He bit his lip. "It means a lot." A lot. Way more than felt safe right now. He'd sworn to stay in control, that he knew how this had to go, and now – oh, God, _Finn_.

Finn took his hand, and Kurt closed his eyes. For the length of that moment, everything was just the way he wanted it and the hard edges of the real world were a forgotten nightmare.

"I don't know about labels and shit," Finn said quietly. "I just want to be with you. Please."

"I can't... Finn, you..."

Kurt started to cry.

"Oh – no. Oh, Kurt, baby, no. _Please_," Finn said, sounding panicked. He bent down beside the bed, pressed Kurt's head against his chest. "Please don't cry. Okay? Just – please don't." The slight note of terror in Finn's voice made Kurt choke out a half-hysterical laugh through his tears. Finn stroked his hair and looked completely lost. And Kurt fought for control, and lost, and weeks' worth of dammed tears flooded out onto Finn's shirt.

"I _hate_ this," he cried eventually, pushing Finn away with both hands, Finn still looking stunned. "I don't cry in front of people! I don't!"

"It's okay to cry, dude," Finn said. "Didn't you tell me that one time, when I was all messed up about the baby?"

"It's fine for _you_." The words almost came out in a snarl, Kurt trying to push the tears back with anger. "I just can't... if I let go in front of people, then..."

"Then what?"

"They win. Give me that box of tissues." Finn did, and Kurt turned away, Finn looked ostentatiously at an ugly pastel on the opposite wall until Kurt had honked and snuffled his way back to normal.

"Sorry," Kurt said, blowing his nose one last time and turning back to face Finn.

"It's okay."

"I need to say this, and I need to be able to say it pulled together, so _please_ don't interrupt," Kurt said, voice still raw. Finn nodded. "I want to be with you so much... you don't even... wait, no, whatever," Kurt said, biting back a sob, trying to turn it into a laugh. "But we can't do this, Finn. We just can't. You can't even say the word "gay" yet. And it's not that you don't know whether you're into guys or not – it's that you don't even know how to look at the question." Finn opened his mouth, then shut it as Kurt raised a warning figure. "Here's something about being gay that you learn from the inside: there's two kinds of being 'closeted', and the one most people know about is the one that doesn't matter half as much. Being closeted to the outside world is one thing: you play straight, and it hurts, and you've got to be prepared for that. But the other thing... there's being out to yourself, Finn, and that's so much more important and so much more confusing and... I don't even know how to say it. But I know you know what it's like." Kurt was studying Finn's face carefully, noting the thousand emotions swarming through Finn's eyes: recognition, embarrassment, determination, fear – always fear... "You're not out to yourself yet, Finn. I've seen you checking out guys' asses and then pulling your eyes away, and I know you're making excuses in your head for why that's normal, how you're just, I don't know, checking out whether they've got the right build for the football team. I've seen you close your eyes every time you and I do anything – like you're afraid to see who it is you're with. At first I thought you were pretending I was a girl. But that's not it, is it?" Finn didn't answer. "You're trying to hide from everything. You know it's me you're with, and that's..." Kurt almost lost control for a second. "...that's more than I thought and more than I... hoped... but _listen_," and his voice got hard and taut again, snapping back into control, "I can't do that, I _can't_. It's bad enough trying to keep a relationship closeted – I can't be with a guy who still isn't out to himself."

There was a long, long silence. Kurt wondered if Finn had understood anything he'd said at all.

"But... you know all that," Finn said, finally. "You know what all of that's like. I mean, you can't expect... it's all just... I'm trying," he said, pleading. "I really am. I just don't know how to..."

Against his better judgment – way against his better judgment – Kurt reached out and took Finn's hand. "I know. But I... with things like this?" He gestured at the hospital bed, the few monitors and slow-dripping plastic bags left. "I can't help you figure it out, Finn. I have too much to deal with on my own."

"No, but I'll figure it out, I will," Finn said, and Kurt looked away, trying not to roll his eyes, as he realized he'd done it: he'd pushed Finn over the point at which he got eager and determined and totally impervious to common sense. The sort of mood in which he picked out names for a child that would never be his, and named it Drizzle; the sort of mood in which he first decided he was going to quit football and do Glee full-time, then decided he was going to quit Glee and do football full-time, then retracted both those decisions and decided he was going to drop out of school and work full-time and propose to Quinn and start a family (talking Finn out of that one had been one of the first bonding experiences Kurt had had with Finn, and something he'd never look back on without a shudder of horror). Finn had no idea who he was, and Kurt could accept that – they were in high school, high school was about figuring this stuff out – but Kurt couldn't ride the rollercoaster with him this time. But Finn wouldn't let up: "You're right, I gotta figure all this out, but I totally will. I'll – I don't know, join that group, the alligator thing –"

"LesBiGayTr Alliance," Kurt told him, mouth twitching. "It stands for Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transsexual. They're in Dayton."

"Yeah, that – I'll figure out what it means. Swear to God. I need to figure it out. You don't have to worry about any of that with me – I'll figure it out on my own time – just, please, look, I know how bad I chickened out, I know how I fucked up, but I'm not going to chicken out anymore. Give me a chance to prove it to you. Please, Kurt."

Kurt was going to say no. Looking over the covers at his twisted knee, running his tongue over the gap where two of his teeth used to be, he was going to say no. He needed to spend these next months regaining his own security, re-learning how not to be afraid of who he was, coming to terms with the real dangers of being gay in a homophobic world. He couldn't hold Finn's hand through the coming-out process while he was dealing with so much stuff on his own – it was too much stress, too much emotional energy, too much –

Finn knelt by the bed and kissed him.

When Kurt spoke a century later, his head was spinning and his voice was ragged. "I'll try," he said.


End file.
